3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)

https://80.lv/articles/geopipe-offers-3d-model-of-new-york-for-free/

by christigeo • 3 years ago

108 26 3 years ago

christigeo• 3 years ago

Digital twin company Geopipe offers a free 3D model of New York City, with its real-life buildings, terrain, and streets. You can download any part of the city in FBX, OBJ, DAE, GLTF/GLB, and OSG formats to use in other software.

To get the customizable and interactive model, you will need to create an account, which gives you free credits every month. Use the currency to download the city or its districts.

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

I am one of the founders of this company! Happy to answer any questions that crop up.

samspenc• 3 years ago

IIRC KitBash [1] is the largest player in this space and has photo-realistic models of large environments including San Francisco. Are you planning to compete with them head-to-head in the same market?

[1] https://kitbash3d.com/

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

It looks like their core business model is modular asset packs, not necessarily tied to real world environments? Potentially some overlap, but I would guess it's unlikely we would be going head-to-head with them in most customer use cases.

mbustamanter• 3 years ago

Do you have a model of the twin towers within it?

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

We haven't been ingesting historical datasets that allow us to generate them, no.

rbanffy• 3 years ago

Can I use them in Roblox? My daughter loves to play with it and Roblox Studio, and having more assets to use (buildings and pre-built places she could modify) would be awesome.

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

There are some limitations with getting big mesh models into Roblox but it's definitely possible - I'll ask if my engineer who's been working on testing that if he has recommendations.

lorenzo_geopipe• 3 years ago

Yep! We've been testing it out ourselves and Roblox does a great job at importing our models. There are a few quirks (Roblox can't perfectly handle our trees and Subway entrances), but I'm sure your daughter will have a lot of fun with them. My one piece of advice is to start small when downloading areas and slowly move your way up in size because Roblox is not always able to process larger models.

mdorazio• 3 years ago

Are the building textures from photos? It looks a lot cleaner than I remember NYC being.

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

We are doing inverse procedural modeling rather than photogrammetry, so there will be some idealization/iconification that takes place - but this also allows end-users to bring in their own material libraries in a pretty seamless way.

unwind• 3 years ago

This page [1] gives a bit of an overview of this technique, which was new to me:

Inverse procedural modeling discovers a procedural representation of an existing geometric model and the discovered procedural model then supports synthesizing new similar models.

Not sure what the "discovers" actually means, need to find a better reference ... This page [2] summarizes the method like this:

We propose an inverse modeling approach for stochastic trees that takes polygonal tree models as input and estimates the parameters of a procedural model so that it produces trees similar to the input.

So I guess that's roughly the same, then. I still don't quite understand it, if you have to manually model a building, and then get a procedural model's parameter out of that, you still had to model it (=do a lot of work)? Is the benefit that you then can store the parameters and use the model to regenerate the building, thus compressing the representation a bunch?

Cool project anyway, makes me long for NYC! :)

[1] https://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/urban/urban-procedural-mode...

[2] https://juliankratt.info/inverse_modeling.php

GlenTheEskimo• 3 years ago

Does it include all boroughs, or just Manhattan?

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

all boroughs!

lubesGordi• 3 years ago

This needs to be in an Assetto Corsa mod. If I could race around a vr NYC with traffic to weave through, I'd be so happy.

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

We just hosted a GameJam on itch and.... you definitely aren't the only one thinking that: https://itch.io/jam/new-york-new-york/entries

gonewalkingbrb• 3 years ago

It'd be fun to have a digital twin of metro Atlanta that allows me to customize and visualize what it'd look like if I ripped out all the roads and replaced them with grass-tracked trolleys and bike trails. Maybe extend The Plane Train from the airport to my house.

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

We're planning the list for our next 10 or so cities! =)

jti107• 3 years ago

this is really cool work. do you guys have any white papers that describe your technical approach?

elfprince1312• 3 years ago

Thanks! And no - we don't have whitepapers, but if you want to get a sense of our philosophical influences, I point to Daniel Ritchie (a prof at Brown)'s publications as he's one of our scientific advisers, although you'll have to fill in the gaps a bit as his work is mostly not specific to geospatial applications.

3D Model of New York Available for Free (and Commercial Use)

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